24 January 2008
Maputo — Mozambican civil society organizations met in Maputo on Thursday for the start of a two day conference preparing their participation in the SADC (Southern African Development Community) regional meeting on poverty and development to be held in Mauritius in April.
According to the concept document for the Maputo gathering, the SADC meeting "provides a platform for SADC, international cooperation partners, civil society and the private sector to commit themselves to political dialogue, reviewing progress around the SADC economic integration agenda, taking into account development and poverty eradication".
The purpose of the Mauritius meeting includes "discussing the regional dimensions of poverty", and "establishing interdependence between poverty reduction strategies and trade policies". It is also intended "to create consensus around the regional poverty reduction strategy between the SADC governments, the business community, civil society organizations and donors".
Opening the conference, Narciso Matos, executive director of the Community Development Foundation (FDC), stressed the "legitimacy and history" of Mozambican civil society.
It had been bodies from outside the political parties (notably religious organizations) that played a key role in securing the agreement that ended the war of destabilisation in 1992, he recalled. Civil society bodies had been critical in the debates leading to the approval of the country's Land Law and Family Law, key pieces of legislation which defend the rights respectively of peasant farmers and rural communities, and of women and children.
Today, the Mozambican Red Cross (CVM) and other NGOs were alleviating the plight of flood victims in the centre of the country. Organisations such as the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) were key in increasing food production, while other civil society bodies were to the fore in campaigns against HIV/AIDS, or to ensure education for all.
"We shall take this experience to Mauritius to share it with colleagues from other countries", declared Matos.
Surveying poverty in the region, Barbara Kalima-Phiri, of the Southern Africa Trust (SAT), pointed out that at the current rate of progress, most SADC member states will be unable to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set by the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, by the cut-off date of 2015.
She suggested that SADC needs a sustained economic growth rate of seven per cent a year to attain the MDGs, but the current average growth rate across the region is only five per cent.
She pointed out that there are competing, and radically different, concepts of poverty and development. The traditional concepts advocated by bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF, which concentrate on economic growth and income, have been challenged by the notion of "Human Development", championed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
In drawing up the "Human Development Index" for individual countries, the UNDP looks, not only at GDP per capita, but also at other key factors for a satisfying life, such as longevity (measured by life expectancy at birth), and educational attainment (measured by the illiteracy rate and by school enrolment).
In this perspective, said Kalima-Phiri, poverty is seen as a "denial of choices and opportunities", and as "social exclusion, human rights violations and entitlement failures".
SADC's own Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP), she added, regards poverty as resulting from "the inefficient use and management of scarce resources, unequal economic power between rich and poor, and limited economic opportunities characterized by small domestic markets for goods and services".
Kalima-Phiri claimed that the civil society approach to poverty stressed ineffective polices "which fail to deal with the root causes of poverty", and the failure to include "the voices of the poor" in decision making.
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